The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar entitled 'Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power' from May 2020 to April 2021. The Seminar will be co-hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Faculty of English.

Sawyer Seminars support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This Seminar aims to develop an interpretive community capable of offering a structural, historical perspective on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning. This new community will include scholars from a variety of fields including historians of science and technology, and scholars from decolonial studies and critical theory, such as race, gender, and disability studies. We will engage in critical and comparative research, from antiquity to the present, on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments in AI technologies to investigate their entanglement in systems of politics, power and control. Four themes will guide our considerations: hidden labour, encoded behaviour, cognitive injustice and disingenuous rhetoric.

The Seminar's activities include:

A week long Summer School, hosted at Homerton College, University of Cambridge from 12 to 18 July 2021